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Wednesday, 30 November 2011

Today (30th November 2011) is the last day of the 30% off offer for Subplot on the Mac App Store, so give it a whirl if you feel like trying it before it goes back up in price. The Macworld review can be found here, and there's more information to be found on our main website.

In other news, Savings Jar has been approved for sale on the Mac App Store, and will launch tomorrow, 1st December. Savings Jar is a neat little app that tries to help you save your loose change and small sums of money towards a larger goal. The website will be updated once the App Store page is live.

Thursday, 10 November 2011

It's been a chaotic couple of weeks, with a lot of work going on towards the next app on the AFK release schedule.

Hopefully I'll have more to share about that next week. But for now I'm taking a little breather from development for a few days to get back to my writing; not just for NaNoWriMo, but also for my other ongoing works.

I'm sure I used to be able to juggle a load of stuff at once, but I'm finding lately that I'm much better at focusing on just one thing rather than spreading my time amongst several projects.

Wednesday, 2 November 2011

I can’t really remember the first time I decided that I wanted to write fiction. I grew up with role-playing games, fantasy novels, Star Wars, Star Trek as well as being there at the start of the home computer revolution. Out of that quagmire of story-telling, mind blowing visual effects and just the whole “range of possibilities” on offer, I became someone who always wanted to imagine something that didn’t exist.

With that in mind, here’s a look at three of the books and films that have helped put me on the path to wanting not just to write, but to be creative in general.

Watchers – Dean R. Koontz

Watchers is my favourite novel from Dean Koontz. In fact, just thinking about it for this blog entry makes me want to dig out from my storage boxes and read it again. Anyone that has read a bit about Mr. Koontz is surely aware of his enduring love for golden retrievers, and one dog, Einstein, takes centre stage in Watchers. However, there’s a lot more going on besides, and it’s the human couple, Travis and Nora, their story, which really resonates with me. If you haven’t read Watchers, then do give it a go. Just don’t watch the film “adaptation”.

Dragons of Autumn Twilight – Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman

While I’m in awe of the world, background, characters and history that Tolkien created for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, I grew up with Dungeons & Dragons, and so it was a revelation to see a series of books based on D&D appear in what was back then, a small, local bookstore. Using the Dragonlance setting, Autumn Twilight is the first in a multitude of trilogies and spin-off books that really made fantasy accessible and fun, with characters that are memorable to this day.

Her Alibi (1989)

A real guilty pleasure of mine, I honestly can say that I think this is a great little film. Tom Selleck stars as Philip Blackwood, a fiction writer in a rut who ends up with a muse in the form of Paulina Porizkova, a Romanian suspected of murder. Maybe I just wanted a big, sprawling house like the one Philip Blackwood owns in the film, I’m not sure. I do remember seeing a special behind the scenes TV show about some of the stunts in the film. Just don’t dismiss it till you’ve seen it. Bluray release please! And look out for the scene with the bow and arrow…

Why those three in particular? Well, Watchers was a book I read at a time where I really could relate to what happened with Travis and Nora. I couldn’t say for sure why it feels relevant to my writing decision – just perhaps that I wanted to be able to create something that meant as much to me – and with writing you get to control your whole world – perhaps we’re all just armchair egomaniacs.

Dragons of Autumn Twilight is an easier one to dissect. Seeing in book form, the sorts of stories that I’d been playing through and helping create with my friends with D&D was really a catalyst for wanting to write.

As for Her Alibi, maybe it’s just seeing a fanciful, romantic vision of how a writer lives – even a fictional one, no matter how far from the truth it may be! The fact is we all need to dream, to have a goal for how we want our lives to turn out, a picture on a vision board. I know the reality for a great many writers is grabbing a few hours hunched in a writing nook with a pad and pen, rather than living in a grand, secluded show home, but if there’s one thing that writing can help you do, it is to believe in something.

The rules of publishing are changing, with eBooks becoming a viable alternative to traditional print and publishing. There’s really nothing stopping you getting your work in the hands of the world at large. So I’m going to take my own advice and publish something myself. Soon.